Green Lantern on HBO Max

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I find the top gun type of badass to be to be too self destructive for my personal liking and it needs a heavily dose of plot armor for it not to come across as too dumb to live.

That's a frequent criticism from people who don't understand the character. Hal is extremely competent, and has put in his 10,000 hours of training and experience so that he can react in any given situation, what Gladwell calls "rapid cognition" or thinking without thinking. Like any athlete who has honed his skills, when people always say, "don't overthink it" it's because someone like Hal has spent the time developing what we'd call a gut instinct in moments where action is called for and there is no time to make a plan. I feel some writers don't nec get that either, but the best stories with Hal exemplify that kind of rapid cognition thinking, which makes sense for someone wearing a weapon that responds to one's thoughts.

As for all the same old criticisms that are being levelled against Hal now, all I can say is I'm getting flashbacks to the "Kyle v Hal" flame wars when Kyle was GL and without derailing this thread any further, these are the same things Kyle fans said about Hal back then, but then "Rebirth" came along, showing Hal as Hal and the GL franchise saw the most success it's ever had. The rest is just personal preference, no matter how much you want to reverse-engineer it as some kind of fact.